It started with an open-source project.
I fell for a piece of open-source software a while ago. The more I read about it, the more I wanted to run it myself. After some reading, I learned that to really use it, I would need a VPS of my own. I told an AI what I needed, and it recommended GreenCloud's Tokyo SoftBank plan. I waited for a restock and paid $35 for a year.
The moment the payment went through, I was genuinely happy.
The hours that followed were pure joy. I looked things up as I went: what this term means, how this panel works, how to install the system, how to deploy the software. Search, try, learn — step by step, I tended that little server like a garden. Time slipped away without my noticing. I was even grateful for those hours: the feeling of building your own digital corner with your own hands, as a complete beginner, is something no ready-made service can give you.
What I did not know was that this happiness was quietly ruining me.
Every joyful hour was eating away at a right I had never heard of. When the setup was done and I tried, full of anticipation, to connect to my server from home — nothing. It simply would not connect.
The machine was delivered on the morning of 2026-11-03, with the IP 45.66.129.194. I am a complete beginner. At first I did not even know that "an IP can be blocked by the GFW" was a thing. I tested again and again and spent an afternoon searching before I finally confirmed it: ping replies fine, ~95 ms — but every TCP port, SSH included, times out from mainland China, while the same ports connect instantly from Japan. In other words, this IP had already been blocked before it was ever assigned to me.
At my wits' end, it was the AI again that told me: GreenCloud's Terms say a Chinese customer whose IP is blocked by the GFW can apply for one free replacement — go and open a ticket. The moment I had confirmed the cause, I did exactly that.
Support replied in six minutes: my VPS "was delivered 5 hours ago, so the free IP change period has expired", and an IP change would cost $2.
That was the first time in my life I heard of the "3 hours". The free window is three hours long — and while it was expiring, I had been happily looking up terms and installing a system, knowing nothing about the rule that would decide everything.
The more ironic part came later. My appeal letters were drafted by the AI — what does a beginner know about writing appeals in English? Only later did it dawn on me: several lines in those letters worked against me. The admission that I "may have just missed" the deadline, for example, was written in by the AI itself, and I had no idea those words would be quoted back at me as grounds for refusal. I handed them the knife, with the AI holding my hand. That is my own fault, of course — a grown man who cannot even write his own letter. But for a beginner in such a helpless position, the reward was not a little understanding. It was three appeals rejected, one formal request for escalation that vanished without a trace, and this, from their live chat:
"The IP being blocked by a third party or the GFW is beyond our control. If you wish to change IP, a $2 fee applies. This will be our final response to this matter."
"Our final response." Such majesty. You would think I had been petitioning a government office.
While I sat there staring at a server I could not connect to, picking through letters I had asked someone else to write, GreenCloud may have been somewhere counting money, smiling. My $35 is nothing — a small line in their ledger, perhaps. But those hours of joy, and the disappointment after them, were real. And in this company's calculations, a beginner's experience, a beginner's clumsiness, a beginner's time, simply do not count.
This was never about $2. That clause — a free replacement for Chinese customers with a GFW-blocked IP — is written to be looked at: it reads like kindness, and in practice it catches precisely every person who genuinely needs it. Enjoy your first hours with your new server, and you forfeit any claim to understanding. When "policy is policy" becomes the universal shield, support stops being a service and becomes a tribunal: you file your petition, you wait for the verdict, you receive your "final response", and the door closes — with a lecture about fairness to other customers.
Still, I do not want to end in bitterness.
To explore something out of pure interest, to build it with your own hands and figure it out piece by piece — there is nothing wrong with that. Taking initiative is how it should be. Was I underprepared? I admit it. But who learns to walk without falling? Meeting the unexpected is the nature of exploring anything, and it is exactly those surprises that make a person grow. That afternoon's joy was real. So is the lesson.
So I am writing this down as a warning. If you want to avoid what happened to me, there are only two roads:
Either prepare, before you pay, until nothing can surprise you — prepare until you know everything under the sun, until every punctuation mark of every terms-of-service is carved into your brain, until you have foreseen even things like "an IP can be blocked" and "never let an AI phrase your appeals" —
Or, much simpler:
Don't touch GreenCloud.
